Lullaby No. 24 - Tango de la Materia

Thrown into the Sea

A swelling dreamscape

Of the dancing mind

And the crests of existential demise

The troughs saturated with things

An old step with the idea of the material,

Incorporated

It was a Viennese waltz at sunset

The dying light on the seaport

The passing of time which came over you

A blanket of darkness beyond your reach

And this how I experienced things

The wealth of the other in situ

To tango with materialism

All things passing

In the observance of your Reason

All things empty

The limit of meaning in the context of objects

As the meaning approaches your desire

Is nothing

A self-effacing construct

Thrown into the Sea

Jason Greendyk

www.jasongreendyk.com

Lullaby No. 23 - Eclipsing the Soul of the World

Reason coerced you

Shaped your natural contours

To the perfect order of the incorporate machine

Once you were too raw for its taste

Now burnt and seasoned to its liking

And flavored with legacies of good sense, reborn

Whittling away your thoughts

In hollow caves of efficiency

For the benefit of your good company

Islands of communist utopia

Where the drab gray walls

You built around yourself for security

Defined your profession

And the fear of being free

Became greater than your own

What event in the spheres

Would shake your structure

And let your thoughts

Run the field of dreams by night

Climbing up ivy stains on white brick

And reaching for the slivers of a bloody moon

And a prophecy

It was a gradual undertaking

As you wrote your body into the night

In pure youth

And flittering trivials of nonsense,

The dialectic with your old soul

Made strokes of sense into your movements

An effort of a wanton passion

To adhere to a strict pattern

And in good step it incorporated your freedom

Exploiting the collective desires of the times

To harness your will

Into the capitalist soul of the world

An eclipse of humanity’s late decision

To embrace technology

And the perpetual new experience

Always moving forward

And now

It offered to relieve you

Of your compromised freedom

With an historical choice

And your dear Reason was obliged

La petite mort

The séance of your errant path

And the au courant

Jason Greendyk

www.jasongreendyk.com

Lullaby No. 22 - Fireflies

The neighbors’ lights were lit

To entertain the shadows

As you washed your hands in the dark

A cool, uncertain cleanliness

Reflecting the dark spaces

In the thoughts of summers past

Your child woke

To an empty black

A wanting anger leapt from your inner fire

A disturbance of the enforced reflective peace

Where you ordered your mind

Past the first pass of sleep

The august dusk

Where once your future was told

In red-dressed anger

Lit the hallway

Beckoning you sooth your Son

You gathered your thoughts, your things

And shut the lights

The only shadows left guided by your inner flame

The scenes most true to you

Displayed in errant dreams

Your Son lost you in His sleep

Wandering the pattern of your mind

And woke to find you again

Your presence His only light

Drifting through the grass

Like a wind

It seeks the setting sun

The vast stretch of things beyond the sky

Daylit moons sunken behind joyous white clouds

Somehow stifling and hollow

As a stale breath

From yawning of futility

Come on the subtle chills

And rhythmic cricketing of lovely night

Chasing in your head

The fireflies

Brief moments

And long shadows

And sleep forevermore

Jason Greendyk

www.jasongreendyk.com

Lullaby No. 21 - Soliloquy

Suspended between

The ideals of the past

And a future

That could have been

But was not

Have I normalized myself?

You were in the mountains

You breathed the clouds

You touched the sky

Something in the desert

Was calling your name

You walked down

And you kept walking

But your calling was a mirage

And you stood in the desert

Halfway between the mountains

And it rained

The days were lost

You must walk by night

To taste the clouds again

From a new mountain

You were calling your name

Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

Lullaby No. 20 - Under His Wings

The taste of glass

Was shrieking

Carved a high pitch

To pour

From the gullet

A madness we once knew

My body and I

Late at night

The unrest of days

Unraveling

Psychosomatic

I slept

My spirit wandered

Dreamscapes everlasting

Transient materials

Wakefulness was intangible

As it came

Landscapes appeared

Under His wings

Men who lie with mankind

Close to the essence

In the thoughts of the clouds

And the wishing winds

That carried the flying birds

Through the falling rain

The ground rose up

The candle on my desk flickered

And the shadow danced on the wall

Let us scale the cave

Where essences smoke

To find a light

For ourselves

My body and I

For life is always on the mind

Of the burning souls

A spark at the apex

Of the empty glass

As the wanting

Passed the gullet

And singed

Psychosomatic

Jason Greendyk

www.jasongreendyk.com

Lullaby No. 19 - Staring at the Sun

The sun set through

My lifted eyes

In waves of music

Sunken oceans of cordial depth

Chopped by laborious winds

Into billows of exhaustion

For dangerous journeys of the mind

Dream states and long forgotten essences

Like the golden haze as you looked west

Staring at the sun

Some forty years ago

By your stretches of temporality

The poetic rendering of time

With an empirical backdrop

Orange light filled your thoughts

Silhouettes of former selves

With golden edges sang

That everything’ll be just fine

This life is but a pass

Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

Lullaby No. 18 - Elysian Fields

Escaping thoughts galloped

Through the Elysian Fields

The contemplation

Extinguishing the intellect

And done

Sweet afterlife

Egress

Your soul was spirited

Galloping away from your mind

And its callous Reason

After your light

The incandescence of your flickering self

Coursing through the shadows

Hunting blind

You sought that which you could not see

Though knew it present

From the shivers down your spine

And through your veins

Like a heroine

That tickled your fancy

At the mere spirited thought

Of touching death

An embassy

Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

Lullaby No. 17 - Grasping at the Dust

April’s evening thrust its light

Long through the aging glass

That cased your home

The things that came to own your soul

Grinning at their blithe rebirth

As they know from whence they came

They stirred your chills

The tap of your spine

The voice of Reason

That longed for you to return your sights

In the aging night of life

Every thing you had cast away

To the great black unknown

Sneered at you in the white brick

The character of your home

Your son grasping at the dust

That sparkled in April’s evening light

Reborn in your aspirations

Breathing of what came before

A bete noire in the letting window

Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

Lullaby No. 16 - Last Rites

August, New Jersey

The spirit of the poet had passed

His humanity as a standing reserve

Was some resonant representation

Of the mathematical course of love

A distilled omen

The impurities left to the airs

Specks like stars against the black

Mere appearances

Of cordial depth

I escaped the perfect solitude

That had sought me

Wanted me thinking alone

In the high desert winds of Texas

No muse to listen

See as I got close to myself

I always wanted someone to be watching

Someone to see the beauty that I saw

I was a traveler of depths

And nowhere was I home

But the great omen of love

Spoke to my spirit

In the passing of the poet

Until one winter night

In the late poet’s own home

The spheres they sang of song

And the gods they danced below

And I whispered to our son

That he was a bountiful echo

In the choral cadence of His mind

And see the spirit of the poet is within you

He can never die

Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

Lullaby No. 15 - Consummation

All I want the spheres
To whisper to your spirit
That all is right in the world
That your being will be a bountiful echo
In the vast reiterations of time
And the discourse of your intellect
Will open wide, sweetly called


Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com